Word got around that she was a seamstress. She did sewing work for the village in return for vegetables and wine.
Père Lemusier shook his head. “You waste your time. With your intelligence you could easily learn Latin and Greek.”
The remark astounded her. “I’ve had no education.”
“Life has educated you,” he said. “You have a good brain. Don’t let it rust.”
He gave her a Latin grammar book for schoolboys. Years ago, when the village still had children, he had taught them. She puzzled over the texts, extracts from Cicero and Caesar and Pliny and Livy, working out what the words meant. Later, he started her on Greek. It took her a long time to learn the letters, but when she had, she found it satisfying to decode. Now that it had something to study and to occupy it, her mind found some ease. She reflected a good deal on what the curé said. Perhaps she was intelligent, after all. It was true that she liked books more than she liked most people. She knew hardly anything about herself. She seemed to have grown up on her own, without having had those conversations which told a person things about herself. The smallest comment fell deeply inside her to be turned over and considered. If her mother lived, if her father lived, she might still discover who she really was.
Young men carrying arms appeared on remote country roads wearing berets and tricolor brassards, members of the FFI. The sight of them made Ilse restless. She, who could have been useful to them, swept floors and darned shirts. She could not live in this paralysis forever. But François, who had got her into the war, had also removed her from it, and she could not oppose his will.
The harvest had been half ruined by the early onset of a bitter winter cold and spring brought no relief. Those who grew shallots, tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes to sell down on the coast in the big markets of Monte Carlo and Beausoleil and who were relied upon also to supply the maquis were in despair. In May the first American air force Liberators droned overhead. June was another month of heavy clouds, driving rain, leaden skies. When the extraordinary news came that the Allies had landed in Normandy, it rippled through the village. Totain, drunk on homemade brandy, charged up to the church carrying a bottle of firewater for the curé. In August the weather changed. The village lay under sultry heat. News came through the farmers’ markets that the Germans were withdrawing from France. She itched to be with her friends, to see Marie-France, to find François. Everything that mattered was happening without her.
That Sunday, one of the villagers presented them with a leveret he had snared to celebrate. Ilse skinned the lanky creature, jointed it, sprinkled the tender flesh with leaves of sage and thyme and roasted it. She served it that night with potatoes, a salad made from tomatoes and fresh basil with the good olive oil, a second salad of wild sorrel she had gathered. They feasted. As a child, she could never have eaten hare. The war had given them the ability to stomach anything. They drank a bottle of wine, savouring it, and then opened a second, for luck. They took their chairs out to the little patch before the door and looked at the stars. She grew steadily more tipsy and odd thoughts kept coming and strange questions.
“I read those Roman emperors and the wars of the Greeks. It’s all about gods and kings and warriors and battles. Nobody tells you what happened to the children,” she said.
“History is written by the winners.”
“All those children who die before they grow up, they’re not recorded anywhere,” she persisted.
“They’re baptised, they go straight to the arms of God.”
“What about the Jews? They’re not baptised.”
She waited. The moon was very high and pale, and shone clear on his face. He said nothing. So she stood up and went in and set about scraping the dishes and washing them and rinsing them, and he was quiet for so long that she thought he had probably gone to sleep and that she would wake him and help him up to bed. When she touched his arm, she saw he was not asleep at all.
“The people here are very ignorant. They don’t even know that Jesus was a Jew. We see the Jews being taken away and we make the sign of the cross and are glad, that they have not come for us. All the early Christians were Jews. I can’t tell you how God will account for it. You are right. Nobody will tell the story of the children. In the Great War, terrible and cruel as it was, men fought other men on battlefields. Now we bomb cities and kill innocents.” The curé stood and, easing himself as straight as he could, he stretched out his arms in the pale light. “Before I became a priest, I was a soldier. They gave me a medal for killing people in the last war. I became a priest because of what I had seen and done. I still have the medal, the Croix de Guerre. That is my terrible sin of pride, that I kept it.”
“Before I became a Catholic, I was a Jew,” she said. “Well, half a Jew.”
By his lack of surprise, she saw that he must have always known. That was why he had sought her out. She should have realised that he was the chief resistant in the village, that he was the contact François knew of.
“People can be more than one thing,” he said. “Perhaps that will save us, in the end.”
It was the longest speech he had ever made.
Perhaps it was because she had completed the final part of her confession that she felt so free. In the morning, Ilse pulled her suitcase out from under the canvas bed and inspected her valuables. She had some francs still, inside the silver frame. She took out the fifty-dollar note and turned it over. It was her talisman, too precious to be changed into bread or meat. Her mother’s fingers had placed it there for a reason. She wondered what its purpose was.
“You are taking away all the youth of the village,” said the curé sadly. She gave him the address of the Bonnards in Cannes and a shirt she had made for him and had been saving for his birthday. Père Lemusier blessed her. He had filled a flour sack full of red onions, courgettes and tomatoes; this he pressed upon her together with a bottle of olive oil. She walked away backwards, waving. Braced against his stick, he waved back. As he dwindled to a black comma against the sky, she saw again what daily life obscured, that God had chosen this tall man to bend down towards the earth. Perhaps it was because of that sin of pride. Without complaint, he bore it.
Ilse took the precaution of getting off the bus before Cannes in case roadblocks were still operating, but there was no Gestapo checkpoint in the suburbs. When air-raid sirens sounded, she sheltered with two old women in the cellar of an empty factory that once made packing cases out of cardboard. They listened to the Allies bombarding the coast and the heavy German guns on Mont Agel booming their response. When the all clear sounded, she waited for a bus down to the Croisette. Nothing came. Eventually she walked down. The suitcase and bag grew heavy. Walls in town were plastered with notices warning that the curfew was lifted only for a few hours, until eight p.m. A German soldier on guard waved her on with a menacing gesture of his gun. It gave her pause, that the Germans were still a presence in Cannes. She needed to find shelter fast. But there was nobody in the quartier where Marie-France and her mother lived; the entire street was boarded up and empty. An old woman carrying a cat in a basket told her that the inhabitants had been evacuated to the empty houses in the La Californie district at the other end of town.
With burning feet, Ilse plodded up the steep winding street, the largest of those that went from the shops up to the elegant quartier of La Californie, the wind coming in off the sea giving little relief from the heat. Halfway up, the Boulevard Montfleury cut across the district. Squinting up, she could see the Col St. Antoine; below lay the sea. Above these handsome villas but screened from sight by the trees, a huge blockhouse dominated the wooded ridge. Lying two hundred metres above sea level, the big naval guns were a major target. It was an unscrupulous choice to move civilians in here, knowing the Allies would not spare the blockhouse for this reason. People were bustling around in the short time left before the curfew. She felt extremely tired and dispirited, that she had left her place of safety for this; that the Germans had not left after all.
She put her suitcase and bag down and sat on a wall, dropped her head into her hands, stared at the ground. When she had rested she would ask somebody if there was a place where she could go for the night.
A pair of dusty feet came up and stopped right in front of her, feet in preposterously high-heeled wooden-soled shoes. “I’ve seen that dress somewhere before.” The familiar voice was full of suppressed laughter.
Ilse leapt up. Marie-France embraced her warmly, drew her along the street. “Maman said she had seen a girl looking exactly like you. And I said, ‘Well, did you ask if it was Laure?’ ‘I didn’t think to,’ says she, ‘I just thought it couldn’t be.’ Isn’t she the limit? So I said, ‘Well, then I’d better go and see.’ ” She embraced her again. “I’m so happy it’s you.”
“Did you think I was dead?”
“A man came and told us you were safe—good-looking, young, very nice.”
“Blond with blue eyes?”
“No. Very dark. A chic type.” It had to be Marcel. Marie-France linked her arm to hers, drew her closer. “It made me so happy, when he came, to see the quality of the people in the maquis. Because of Fernand and Jean-Baptiste.”
“That person you saw—he’s not maquis—don’t say that.”
“I won’t tell anyone anything, don’t you worry.”
Her dark eyes shone with excitement. Ilse saw how invigorated she was by the idea that “Laure” had gone to the maquis and returned, as though that guaranteed the safe return of her men. She said nothing, not wanting to disillusion her. The penalty for leaving the maquis was death; contact with families was frowned upon. For some reason Marcel had broken a rule, out of sheer decency. He had a mind of his own; that was why François prized him so.
Along with their downstairs neighbours and her mother’s sister-in-law, Aunt Annie, the Bonnard family occupied an ugly pink villa, partly sheltered by the ridge. Fortunately it had a very deep cellar where they could shelter during air raids. “Concrete.” Marie-France rapped a wall. “We’ve not had one clear night without a raid up here.” She told Ilse to leave her suitcase down there. They set to, making a ratatouille of her vegetables while the gas was still on. It was only an hour before the first siren sounded. The Allies were shooting up minefields, attacking the batteries along the coast and aiming at German targets all over Cannes.
“Wehrmacht engineers filled the Carlton’s cellars with dynamite. They’ll blow it up in one huge blast when the Allies come.” She shrugged. “But the Germans still eat and drink there.”
At one of the first bombardments, seemingly directly overhead, Marie-France’s mother soiled herself from terror. Stiff with fear, she lay on the stinking mattress with a pillow over her head. She seemed to Ilse to have aged considerably in the past year. They cleaned her up as best they could, but could not make her happy again. From time to time she wept. Eventually she slept; Aunt Annie and the elderly neighbours did too. It was the one small benefit of age. Ilse and Marie-France sat with their heads together, went on whispering as the earth thundered and shook. In spite of everything, the pleasure of being with her was intense. Friendship was precious, it was worth the bombs. In snatches, they too slept. The day passed in the cellar; another night of raids succeeded it; the authorities stopped bothering to turn on the sirens. Spooning up the last taste of good mountain food, trying not to eat too fast, Ilse remembered the intense silence of village nights as if they had been experienced in centuries past. They had very little water and the electricity was cut. Succeeding waves of Allied aircraft attacked the coast, point by point. Back thundered the Nazi coastal batteries on Mont Agel with ear-splitting explosions. The earth shook all day with the thunder.
The old neighbour crawled over to Ilse, pointing a finger at her. “You see?” he said, his hand shaking with rage or perhaps just old age. “The Allies are ten times worse than the Boche.”
They rationed the candles and for long periods sat silently in the pitch-blackness. Exaltation, the certainty that this must be the end, gave way to hunger and thirst and misery. The ground near them rocked and shuddered with extremely near hits.
When the bombardment stopped, they came like moles blinking into the light and the strong, green smell of mashed undergrowth and pine. The tarmac, ripped up by the blasts, was still hot. Bundles of clothes lay here and there: people who had been caught in the open or pieces of those who had been blasted into it. The ball was an old woman’s head, a mush of festering grey with flies on it; the rest of the body nowhere to be seen. White bones stuck out of a severed leg. As the stench reached her, Ilse retched, dry-throated, behind a bush. She had nothing to bring up but bile.
Down the hill, a truck was giving out cups of water. Civilian casualties were heavy everywhere. Nice had also been attacked, and Marseilles. The business of collecting, identifying and burying bodies had already begun. Ilse watched a man slowly picking his way through the burnt-out cars and pieces of shrapnel, bending over and looking at each body as though he were a connoisseur and then carrying on. On this beautiful evening he might have been a typical inhabitant of Cannes out for his daily stroll. He told them that somebody down the road had a functioning radio. Ilse and Marie-France went from house to house until they found it. There was insurrection in Paris. They heard a brief report on Soviet successes, another on the Allies’ advances in Normandy but not a word of the Riviera.
“Paris has been mined,” said Aunt Annie with finger-wagging authority. “You’ll see. Hitler will never surrender it, except in ruins.”
“A tragedy for the nation,” said Maman Bonnard tearfully. She treated her sister-in-law as an absolute authority.
“The Allies are going to land tomorrow, August fifteenth. Napoleon’s birthday. It’s all planned.” Annie was very certain.
“Ssh. You’re ridiculous,” said Marie-France.
The siren began to wail. The shelling started up and went on. It was another day before they knew that in one respect at least Aunt Annie had been right. The Allies had indeed landed, not at Cannes, which was so well defended, but elsewhere along the coast. The radio reported that German troops were falling back everywhere. But the shooting and shelling went on.
“Wait,” said Marie-France. “Wait. They’re gone except when the population comes out to celebrate. Then they’ll shoot us all.”
But the next time they came up into the still suffocating heat, Allied warships were anchored offshore. A French warship was shelling the German positions at Grasse. The huge black pillar of smoke that never stopped rising into the sky to the east marked the fuel dump at Antibes; it had received a direct hit. It burnt for days. A week later the guns fell silent. Overnight the FFI took both the blockhouse above them and the other main one at the extreme point of the Croisette. The old man spoke of la gloire and Marie-France winked at Ilse behind his back.
“Do you believe it?”
Neither of them believed anything.
The girls cleared the cellar out; dragged their possessions into the garden where the branches of the torn pine trees hung down, tired and sad-armed. Then, too weary to do more, they sat on ground littered with broken tiles and pieces of stucco, shredded mimosa and jacaranda, letting the sun warm their backs. The silence was eerie. The fighting had swept over them and gone elsewhere. Later that afternoon the sound of batteries bombarding targets started up and, like a film, they saw the response of the warships lying offshore in little white puffs of smoke. They heard the thump of bombs, the noise of exploding anti-aircraft shells, the odd salvo of artillery somewhere on the Esterel, all muffled like a storm carrying on beyond the next hill.
Marie-France went off on the scrounge, came back with a jug of water and two bottles of wine. A bomb had smashed open a house further up the hill and people were taking wine from the cellar there, which was very well stocked. Filling glasses, they saluted the warships on the water. When it was her turn to drink, Maman’s hand shook so much that most of her wine spilt. Venturing into town later, they found the shops shuttered and c
losed. Toiling back, they saw an open staff car race in from the direction of La Napoule. It was a funny drab colour with a white star painted on the bonnet and unfamiliar markings. It screeched to a standstill. The Americans had stopped to look at a map. The light was fading. They were discussing something, gesticulating; one of them got out a torch and held it over the map. Marie-France nudged Ilse and stepped boldly closer. One of the young men was very blond and somehow golden in the light. He smiled at them, folding the map and saluting with one finger to his cap as they accelerated away with a sudden jerk. The car abruptly changed direction; the torch, resting on the front ledge, rolled over and toppled out. Marie-France picked it up. It was a big heavy one and very good quality. She turned it on and off, on and off. For a year, nobody had seen a battery that worked.
They climbed silently back up the slope with their spoils of war. The light of the torch went ahead, a beacon against the dark. Ilse was reflecting on how strong their accents were; she had not understood one single word the soldiers had said. Her friend looked very thoughtful. “You know, we’ve just seen the future,” said Marie-France as they turned into the Boulevard Montfleury.
Camped out in the garden, the two girls were woken at four in the morning by the pipe in the kitchen first hammering, then coughing up a mixture of air and brackish water. It sputtered and spat brown gobbets. After ten minutes, the small basin contained a thin layer of rusty silt. The bathroom upstairs was smashed.
The Children's War Page 40